Ottawa’s been having a nice stretch of sunshine lately, and with a high pressure front moving through the area, today was no exception. After doing some stuff at home, I headed out to run a couple of errands.

My first stop was the Ottawa Bagel Shop on Wellington, not too far from where I live. Home of some of the best bagels in Ottawa, it also sells all sorts of chocolates, freshly-made cookies and a whole lot of other delicacies. I picked up some Michel Cluizel Grand Lait 45% milk chocolate and a couple of small bars of Green & Black’s Organicwhite chocolate. I’ve been a big fan of the various chocolates that Green & Black’s make for some time now, but I only recently discovered Michel Cluizel after watching a show on Treasure HD called How The Best Is Done that featured some of the best chocolates in the world. Both makers produce amazing types of chocolate!

Anyways, after buying some cookies to go with the chocolate, I headed off to the Harvest Loaf Bakery, just a couple of doors down from the Ottawa Bagel Shop. There, I picked up a loaf of light pumpernickel bread and a croissant and then continued down Wellington.

Swinging by the Tim Horton’s on Richmond Road near Woodroffe for a quick snack (the croissant just didn’t do the trick), I decided to follow Richmond Road out to its namesake, the village of Richmond.

One of the main reasons to visit Richmond is the Richmond Bakery (their Yellow Pages ad since they don’t appear to have a website). I can recall going there with my parents as a kid. Besides bread, they also have cookies. Lots of cookies. I picked up a dozen sugar jam cookies for a geocaching roadtrip tomorrow and a jam-filled cookie.

From there I decided to check up on a geocache I have near North Gower, Out in the cedars (GCP93C). I placed this cache about four years ago and it’s been well-visited since then. It took about 25 minutes to drive to the cache from Richmond and about 25 seconds to confirm that it was still ok.

Heading east along Roger Stevens Drive, I found myself in Metcalfe, from whence I made my way to South Keys Mall to pick up the bits to make a new geocache out of. After braving the crowds at Wal-Mart, I headed home with my newly-acquired stuff.